The remarkable 18th-century poet Alexander Pope (though he was not a Pope!) penned these elegant lines: “Nature and nature’s law lay hid in night/ God said, ‘Let Newton Be!’, and all was light.” Pound for pound, that is one fantastic quote! In this blog, I will offer a few interesting, little-known, and insightful quotations by theologians, believers, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. As I tend to be agnostic/skeptical/humanistic, and because religion is absolutely rife with orthodoxy/teachings/dogma (there are 30,000 denominations/sects of Christianity alone!), I will focus on the more philosophical/theological aspects of religious quotes.
“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime, Therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; Therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”
“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we will find one of the great secrets; when you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
“The most radical question which anyone can be asked is not how much their possessions cost, but whether they have found something of value – that is, something that makes living worthwhile.” ~ Alister E. McGrath
“Your true character Is most accurately measured by how you treat those who can do ‘nothing’ for you.” ~ “Mother Teresa”
“Our calling is not only to pull people out of the river, but to go upstream to find out what or who is pushing them in.” ~ Jim Wallis
“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” ~ John Wesley
“Jesus believed in healing the sick. Republicans believe in healing the sick if they happen to have insurance and can pay the medical bills. Jesus believed in helping the poor. The GOP believes in helping the very wealthiest 1% of our population. Jesus told us to love our neighbor as ourselves. He did NOT qualify that statement with “unless they happen to be gay or Muslim.” Republicans call themselves “Pro-life”…yet they are gung-ho for the death penalty and for war. Jesus was “pro-life”… all life. …No, the GOP does NOT ‘own’ Christianity or morals…not by a longshot.”
“God made so many different kinds of people. Why would he allow only one way to serve him?”
“It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.”
“I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance.”
“Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”
“Children are 25 percent of the population but 100 percent of the future. If we wish to renew society, we must raise up a generation of children who have strong moral character. And if we wish to do that, we have two responsibilities: first, to model good character in our own lives, and second, to intentionally foster character development in our young.” ~ Thomas Lickona
“I’m not a [Biblical] literalist in that every jot and tittle is from the Lord. This is a little difference in my thinking through the years.”
“Figures like Socrates and Jesus and the prophets are safely entombed in antiquity. But what if they are not simply to be revered as exceptional figures from the past, but to be followed in the present?”
“I see that in the future, things that we have lost in the past will be recovered. There’s a search for those things, a search for spirituality, for nature, for the goddess religions, for family and human bonding. All that has been lost in this industrial era. People are in desperate need of those things.”
“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”
“Last year, Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas. Clean water for the whole world, including every poor person on the planet would cost about $20 billion. Let’s just call that what it is: A material blasphemy of the Christmas season.” ~ Jim Wallis
“We were not born into the world believing that Christianity was the truth; we were born into a culture – we worship the gods of our fathers. If all of us in this room had been born in the mountains of Tibet, I think the chances are pretty good that we would all be Buddhists. And chances are also pretty good that we would hold on to that Buddhist philosophy with that same passion that we hold on to our current faith.”
“Creation continues lavishly, and we are a part of it. Not only are stars and people and fireflies born, not only do they die, but what we as creatures do during our lifespan makes a difference. We are not just passive, acted upon; we are also actors in the great drama of creation.” ~ Madeleine L’Engle
“First they came for the Jews. I was silent. I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists. I was silent. I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists. I was silent. I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me. There was no one left to speak for me.”
“Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.”
“Only in a fantasy capital like Washington could Sunday morning talk shows become the high church of conventional wisdom, with partisan shills treated as holy men whose gospel of prosperity always seems to boil down to lower taxes for the rich.”
“The most powerful moral influence is example.” ~ Huston Smith
“…when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.”
“The epithet ‘wise’ is too great and befits God alone; but the name ‘philosopher,’ that is, ‘lover of wisdom,’ or something of the sort, would be more fitting and modest for a man.” ~ Socrates
“I don’t let my religion get too complicated, I just kind of go: ‘Well, I think I know what God is. God is love, and as much as I respond in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that’s my religion.'”
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
“The only theology worth doing is that which inspires and transforms lives, that which empowers us to participate in creating, liberating, and blessing the world.”
“Without virtue, and without integrity, the finest talents and the most brilliant accomplishments can never gain the respect, and conciliate the esteem, of the truly valuable part of mankind.”
“For every well-attested, heavily researched, and eminently authoritative argument made about the historical Jesus, there is an equally well-attested, equally researched, and equally authoritative argument opposing it.”
“Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.”
“[The New Testament tells us] there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat.”
“People who live in societies ravaged by religious or communal bigotry know that every religious text – from the Bible to the Bhagwad Gita – can be mined and misinterpreted to justify anything, from nuclear war to genocide to corporate globalization.”
“Right now, for the first time in history, the line between science and religion is starting to blur. Particle physicists exploring the sub-atomic level are suddenly witnessing the interconnectivity of all things, and they’re having religious experiences. Buddhist monks are reading physics books and learning about experiments that confirm what they have believed in their hearts for centuries but have been unable to quantify.”
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” ~ Isaac Newton
“Most religions encourage us to take responsibility for ourselves but to refrain from judging others. Is that because our natural inclination is the opposite: to excuse our own failures while blaming others for theirs?”
“To see ethics as a repressive set of rules is to misunderstand terribly the moral dimension of life. Let me put it straightforwardly: The way I understand it, ethics is fundamentally a concern for spiritually healthy people in socially harmonious relationships.” ~ Tom Morris
“But what does it mean to be on God’s side? I believe it starts with focusing on the common good – not just in politics, but in all the decisions we make in our personal, family, vocational, financial, communal, and, public lives. That old but always new ethic simply says we must care for more than just ourselves or our own group. We must care for our neighbor as well, and for the health of the life we share with one another. It echoes a very basic tenet of Christianity and other faiths – love your neighbor as yourself – still the most transformational ethic in history.” ~ Jim Wallis
“Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.”
“I’m a Christian, and a proud Christian. I read the good book and do my best to live it. I have never read the verse where it says, Gay people can’t marry. I have never read the verse where it says, Thou shalt discriminate against those not like me. I have never read the verse where it says, Let’s base our policy on hate and fear and discrimination. Christianity is, to me, love and hope and faith and forgiveness—not hate and discrimination.”
“My moral value is based on the Golden Rule “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.” My moral values would not allow me to vote for a man who obviously does not live by that standard, and has the gall to call himself a Christian.”
“It is wise to take a close look into the world of your mind and to make the distinction between beneficial and harmful states of mind. Once you can recognize the value of good states of mind, you can increase or foster them.”
“There were signs on every street corner saying, “This town is Jew-free. Whoever will help Jew descendants is dead.” So I knew what could happen. But that doesn’t matter; they were human beings. I knew I didn’t have to help [save Jews from the Nazi concentration camps]; I took the responsibility. And I believed so strongly that God put me there, so everything will be fine.”
“If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.” ~ Huston Smith
“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
“No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.” ~ Isaac Newton
Were the “founding fathers” of the United States religious, spiritual, agnostic, deistic, or atheistic? Here is a source to answer that question.
Look up more quotes about theology, religion, sacredness, and love here in The Wisdom Archive!
